...Philadelphia’s Fabric Row! I really couldn't resist taking a picture of this macabre yet funny window shop.
Since Halloween has Anglo-Saxon origins, I never celebrated it as a young girl in my home country. Actually, Italy only imported vampires, witches and other assorted monsters and the entire Halloween shenanigans in the last few years.
Sadly, they replaced local celebrations for 1st November, that is All Saints’ Day, and 2nd November, a day dedicated to the commemoration of the dead. According to the original traditions, around this time of the year you would also eat special cakes like the “bones of the dead” or marzipan fava beans (this tradition is connected with the classical times when fava beans were used as funeral offers, but also with the fact that the flower of this plant is characterised by black spots in the shape of the "tau" letter from the Greek alphabet - the initial of the word "thanatos", death).
Mesmerised by their pastel colours and taste, I developed a rather serious addiction for the marzipan fava beans of the dead and my mum was obliged to send me the sweets to Glasgow to avoid getting my begging yet annoying phone calls asking for the sweets.
Marzipan fava beans addiction aside, I must say well done to the National Cinema Museum of Turin for organising last night a Halloween party in connection with their exhibition "Diversamente vivi. Zombi, vampiri, mummie, fantasmi" ("Living Differently. Zombies, vampires, mummies, ghosts" - until 9th January 2011) that analyses through masks, gadgets, paintings (think Edvard Munch's "The Vampire") posters and clips our passion for monsters in comics, films, literature and videogames, trying to understand what fascinates us about the living dead.
An entire film retrospective that kicks off tomorrow (1st-2nd November; 9th-11th November) at the museum's art-house filmhouse - the Cinema Massimo - also focuses on rare horror/cult films (John Carpenter, Roger Corman and Lucio Fulci's classics are obviously included) and on movies dedicated to mummies.
Among the latter there is actually one film I would like to see again from a fashion point of view and that's Albert Capellani and Henri Desfontaines' silent film Le Roman de la Momie (1911).
The film was based on Théophile Gautier's novel and inspired by France's passion for early Egyptian archaeological discoveries.
Le Roman de la Momie told the story of Lord Evandale, a young man who discovered a perfectly preserved mummy of a woman and, falling into a reverie, he turned into the poet Poëri in love with the beautiful Tahoser.
Apart from the costumes, it's a very interesting film for the use of the pochoir technique. Employed in fashion by Mariano Fortuny, the pochoir (or stencilling) technique was also applied to some early silent films such as Nino Oxilia's to add emotional force or symbolic meanings to characters and costumes. Definitely worth investigating/rediscovering it then!
Throughout the years I developed an excellent resistance to huge museums which means I can happily wander around the largest museum buildings for an entire day and still maintain a blessed state of relaxation after several hours.
While huge museums do not scare me, I do have a total aversion for huge department stores.
They indeed manage to make me extremely paranoid for one main reason, I usually can't find the exit when I want to get out and end up getting lost in a sea of designer clothes I'm not even interested in.
This is why it’s probably easier to find me in some forsaken corner of the ceramic gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum than inside Selfridges, but this is also the main reason why I avoided stepping inside huge New York department stores like Bergdorf Goodman, and preferred stopping outside to take some pictures.
Apart from finding less embarrassing getting lost in the streets of New York rather than inside a department store, I also found the mansion-style commercial building where Bergdorf Goodman is located on Fifth Avenue (designed in 1928 by architects Kahn & Jacobs) rather interesting.
Anyway, architectural musings are not the main topic of this post. In fact I would like to dedicate this picture of one of the department store windows - with a dummy wearing a black tulle gown from Oscar de la Renta's Spring/Summer 11 collection (View this photo) matched with a Junya Watanabe camouflage jacket from the designer's Autumn/Winter 2010 collection - to Sarah Scaturro.
Sarah is a textile conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt and has been extensively researching fashionable camouflage, its meanings and the impact of its patterns on the wearer’s identity and psychology.
Apart from lecturing at the "Fashion in Fiction" conference she recently did a presentation at the Royal Military Museum in Brussels entitled “God is Camouflage, Disruptive Patterns in Fashion” (during the conference “Camouflage Takes Centre Stage”).
I’m not sure what Sarah would make of such an ensemble, but I guess she would come up with a very interesting analysis. I can only add that, if I'd only had the tulle evening gown in the picture when I was at university (my camouflage years...) and could have matched it with my brother's military wardrobe (that I had appropriated after he finished his compulsory military service), people may have perceived me more like a lady than like an anarchic terrorist, and maybe my beloved military beret wouldn't have attracted the curiosity and unwanted attention of a bizarre knife-carrying former Foreign Legionnaire at a Glasgow bus stops on a rainy and cold night. But that, I guess, is another story...
Despite what the main players want us to believe, there is a lot of loneliness, solitude and isolation in the fashion world.
In a way, even when the fashion industry pretends it is opening its doors to ordinary people like young bloggers, it’s actually behaving like a self-centering magnet, trying to recreate a sort of condescending elite within the elite, superficially opening its sancta sanctorum to the masses, yet effectively recreating new states of isolation.
But the fashion industry is definitely not the only isolated and isolating force in our modern society.
New means of communications - think about mobile phones and the Internet - may have given us the chance of quickly finding new friends or sending instant messages to somebody living miles away from us, but they also created new levels of loneliness and isolation, making us forget too often the importance of real social interaction (yes, I’m among those people who find rather unnerving chatting with/interviewing somebody who checks their mobile phone every 3 seconds).
Yet it can be a hard task to describe and define isolation and its social implications, and it can be even harder to do so in a fashion collection.
So far Hussein Chalayan proved through his designs, films and art projects that he is able of sparking up thought-provoking dialogues, moving from abstract concepts, dissecting the psychological, social and political truths in our lives while also referencing technology and science.
For his Spring/Summer 2011 collection Chalayan moved from Japanese poetry and theatre and from the more surreal aspects of the Japanese culture, one of them being the “sakoku”.
This term relates to the policy of isolation during the Tokugawa Period, when the country was closed to the outside world.
Further studies on this subject actually proved that Japanese trade continued under this period of time and cultural exchanges didn’t stop, as Japan kept on introducing Chinese culture, but also Western Culture through its contacts with the Dutch.
Chalayan somehow did the same, focusing on a state of "open" isolation that he translated in his collection into an exploration of his own archives, reintroducing some of his previous designs and updated or simplifying them.
The designer presented his collection in Paris at the beginning of October with a film.
Chalayan’s 14-minute long video (it was available on the Internet for a short while and you can still watch it from this link, though I’m not sure how long it will be available for before it gets spotted and removed for copyright reasons...) has a sort of narrative structure, since it is divided into different sections.
Each section is introduced by a title that is somehow used to describe a different group of designs included in the new collection.
The titles are almost a way to introduce the designer’s main idea or concept (and remember how Chalayan often claimed he is an ideas person) and visualise his feelings, thoughts and inspirations.
The first chapter of the film is entitled [Sakoku] and features a mysterious figure in black attire (we will discover only later on in the film the role of this figure and its connection with the Bunraku theatre), followed by images of models in black and white trouser suits with their heads covered by a black or white veil.
A new chapter, [Decentered], introduces instead designs such as waistcoats matched with light voile dresses in pale blue erupting from the side seams.
[Wrapping in Transition] focuses mainly on deconstructed designs with dresses and shirts characterised by separated rigid collars and diagonal broderie anglaise edging, almost a reference to thin yet strong Japanese paper or "washi" and to Japan's obsession with packaging (also appearing in the paper-like designs with pale blue patterns).
Chiaroscuro contrasts appear in the section entitled [Shadow Reading] mainly comprising designs with sheer chiffon sleeves or mesh inserts and opaque/matte fabrics, while [Imminence of Water] features deconstructed shifts, long column dresses and creations that call to mind in their tight bodices and full skirt the tutu of Edgar Degas’ "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years".
[Haiku] remains the most poetical part of the film, with a model in a floral chiffon dress surrounded by black puppeteer-like figures moving her dress and turning her into a puppet of the Bunraku theatre (View this photo) performing a traditional auspicious, celebratory or 'travel' dance (try to see if the link to the video still works to watch the effect and also listen to the very evoking soundtrack by Robin Rimbaud AKA Scanner).
The video closes with the final section, [Floating Body], with curving waistcoats (similar to the ones included in the Spring/Summer 2010 collection), shirt and tunic dresses incorporating capes (that add a touch of futurism to the collection) in shades of fuchsia, jade green or burnt orange, their rigid silhouettes creating the illusion of floating on the models' bodies.
Though this collection displays strong links with some previous designs by Chalayan, the emphasis remains on minimalism (also mirrored in the shoes - mainly wooden platform sandals with ankle shackles, a reference in their look and material of choice to the Japanese "geta" sandals) and functionality.
Luckily, Chalayan managed to avoid the most banal references to Japan, from kimono sleeves to trendy obi belts (seen on hundreds of runways in New York…), introducing the main inspirations for this collection via subtle details like the paper-like decorations mentioned above or the black patent inserts on crepe satin dresses evoking Japanese lacquer cabinets.
Chalayan's video closes with a cryptic sentence: “It will be lost if the floating shadows catch up with reality.”
Does that "It" refer to the title of the film and of the collection, "Sakoku"?
If so, is the designer trying to tell us that the state of isolation will be broken if the watchers focus their attention on the "floating shadows" embodied in the film by the mysterious puppeteers, finally seeing them and making them real, tangible? The doubt remains.
What we know for sure is that with this collection Chalayan made a rather original connection with puppet theatre, avoiding more banal references to the rich and colourful costumes of the Bunraku theatre to look at the deeper meanings that the role of the puppeteers may provide.
In the Bunraku theatre the puppeteers are indeed on stage and in full view and their physical presence gives the puppet an uncanny physical power.
By including Bunraku puppeteers in his film, Chalayan tried to give his collection more physicality, breaking once again the boundaries of fashion superficiality to find new, more powerful and stronger signifiers behind fashion and beyond isolation.
Sometimes life is truly bizarre. I’m named after my maternal grandmother whose sister migrated to the United States in the 30s, following her husband and brother-in-law (originally from Bucchianico, in Abruzzo, Italy) who had left before her.
After passing through Ellis Island, the two men first arrived in Philadelphia and then moved to Baltimore where they worked as tailors.
Decades after all this happened, I met in Philadelphia with relatives I had never seen before (the highlight of my trip – now I also have a distant cousin who has turned into my younger sister!), reminiscing, trying to put together some pieces of the puzzle and understand where and how we lost touch.
The main words that could be used to summarise this piece of family history – emigration, Philadelphia, tailoring – could also be used to describe one very interesting exhibition currently on in Philly. Entitled “Tailoring Philadelphia: Tradition and Innovation in Menswear”, curated by H. Kristina Haugland, Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles and Supervising Curator for the Study Room and Academic Relations, and organised in the Costume and Textiles Study Gallery on the second floor of the Perelman Building, part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this exhibition features suits from the museum’s rich collection of menswear and focuses on the art of tailoring, “one of Philadelphia’s most important industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”, as the displays explain.
The 19th century brought indeed important changes in men’s styles: a new masculine ideal was created and emphasis was given to the tailoring of men’s clothes.
Simpler styles and sober colours prevailed and the focus moved onto precise cutting and construction.
The evolution continued throughout the 20th century, helped also by the industrialisation and by the fact that menswear is usually easier to standardise than womenswear.
Philadelphia boasted one of the earliest clothing factories that manufactured men’s uniforms for the War of 1812.
In the 1840s the factory turned into a major producer of men’s ready-to-wear for the wholesale and retail markets.
Small businesses also flourished and, by 1914, the Philadelphia Directory featured around 2,400 tailors, including many immigrants who transmitted their skills and passion for craftsmanship to the next generation (fascinating, isn’t it? I actually think this part should be investigated further).
As the decades passed, menswear kept on evolving and a new trend arrived, individuality.
Philadelphia responded with the innovative work of tailors such as Francis Toscani who pushed the boundaries of traditional tailoring, becoming one of the most successful local designers.
Francis D. Toscani (1915 – 1973) had learnt his tailoring skills from his Italian-born father and, as a young man, he worked part-time in the city’s factories.
He made his first suit when he was 16 and, a year after, he started a custom-tailoring business, establishing himself as a designer by 1950.
Toscani was employed as chief designer from 1959 to 1969 at H. Daroff and Sons of Philadelphia, founded by Harry Daroff (who had emigrated from Russia at the end of the 1800s).
The company soon turned into one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of men’s apparel, producing more than a million men’s suits each year under labels such as Botany 500 and Worsted-Tex.
Toscani received numerous awards and also worked for the International Association of Clothing Designers, becoming its president in 1965 and later on chairman of the association’s Task Force, a group focused on predicting menswear trends.
Philadelphia in the meantime remained a leader in menswear, producing nearly a third of men’s top fashion garments in the United States in the late 60s (looks like there is enough material here for a couple of books and for a documentary/film as well…).
“Tailoring Philadelphia” (on until next Summer) features over fifteen garments by Toscani and opens with a selection of classic menswear and eveningwear employed to illustrate the traditional forms of men’s suits in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Among the other garments in this section of the exhibition there are a sack suit from 1952 with no waist seam and a lose silhouette; a wool herringbone twill single breasted morning/cutaway coat (from 1933) matched with a jacket, waistcoat and trousers by D.W. Scola (Domenick Scola (1875-1963), who emigrated from Italy to Philadelphia in 1889 and established his tailoring business in the mid-20s at 1827 Chestnut Street); a 1905 frock coat – a standard daywear item with double lapels (one set of lapels in silk – fourth image in this post) and a knee-length skirt; a tuxedo by A.B. Kirschbaum and a 1940 tailcoat (fifth image).
The 60s are introduced via a jacket with a detachable overcoat (1966-67) created by Swedish designer B. Larsen for H. Daroff and Sons (sixth image in this post – first coat on the right).
The interesting thing about this item is that it functioned as an overcoat and a sports jacket with zippers under the jacket front.
Zippers turned into a popular and useful feature in the 60s: in Italy, Rome-based tailor Angelo Litrico took inspiration from astronauts’ suits incorporating zips into his designs, though the king of zippered menswear designs in Europe remained Pierre Cardin with his zippered "cosmocorps" suits.
Toscani created in 1967 an ivory silk slubbed plain weave safari jacket for the Worsted-Tex brand with an insertable pocket flap and a removable peplum (sixth image in this post – the jacket in the centre).
This trick allowed the wearer to convert the garment via a waist zipper into a formal mess-style coat. Toscani often employed zippers in his designs, such as his 1969 suit with broad shoulders and trim waist (eighth image in this post – suit in the centre).
The designer kept on experimenting along these lines, adding details to his jackets that could alter their looks and allow the wearer to create two different designs.
A good example of this trend is the jacket Toscani designed in 1968 for Botany that was characterised by free-hanging pockets that provided extra space. The jacket could be worn as a high-buttoned tunic or with the lapels buttoned back (seventh image in this post).
Some of the pocket panels integrated in Toscani’s designs were also attached by Velcro strips and could be removed to convert a coat into a short jacket, allowing the wearer to quickly change his look.
When Toscani arrived on the scene the tailoring industry was going through some major changes.
Individuality and attention to details became fundamental points and a new revolution was brought on by those designers who had until then focused mainly on womenswear like Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, André Courrèges, Valentino and Ken Scott, who suddenly turned to the menswear market.
Like many of his colleagues, Toscani wasn’t too convinced by this switch in interest since he strongly believed that men’s apparel designers had to be well-focused “creative engineers”, as the notes to this exhibition explain, “overseeing production details, ensuring quality and fit, and gauging market timing”.
All the pieces Toscani created were based on the highest tailoring skills and characterised by versatility and unusual elements and colours, like his jacket from 1960 in summery fabric, with welted seams running diagonally down the sides and vertical pockets (tenth image in this post), his revolutionary short-sleeved jackets from the same year designed for Botany, his 1968 suit with a rounded collar, oval waist and futuristic lines or his Nehru coats that featured architectural lines.
In some cases ideas for new designs came to Toscani from the most unlikely places, including the American West and the Colt .45 that inspired a 1960 jacket in whipcord twill, or geometry, as proved by a jacket featuring diagonal lines extending from underneath the collar and converging on the front and by a suit made in 1968 and showcased in Stockholm that included an unusual closure, front seams and pockets.
Another interesting aspect of Toscani’s work was the way he recreated a tangible history of the evolution of menswear in his suits in which he fused two styles from different decades such as the 50s and the 60s or the 40s and the 60s to show students (he taught at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science) which parts of the suits had dramatically changed as the years passed.
In his “Half and Half” Suit (c. 1962–65) Toscani fused the style of the early 1950s, in pale grey, with the cut and details of the early 1960s, in dark brown, but he also recreated a golf suit in 1928 style to illustrate the evolution of sports clothes (fourteenth image in this post - suit on the left).
Among the highlights of the exhibition there is also a black pinstriped wool suit from the early 60s in the style of the “zoot suit”, with a longer jacket with padded shoulders, nipped in waist and tapered trousers (fourteenth image in this post - suit on the right).
There is definitely nothing ordinary in the designs included in this exhibition, all the details are indeed very modern and prove that Toscani had a terrific eye for details and a passion for versatility, two things that not many young designers seem to have nowadays.
Trend agencies forecast a new revolution in menswear every season and, while season after season we have seen interesting collections on our runways, there have been very few signs of real changes in attitude.
Last year menswear also suffered a significant decline even in strong markets like the Middle East (read: Dubai), balanced by the vitality of the Asian market.
New projects, collaborations, websites entirely dedicated to menswear turned 2010 into a brighter year for the “monde au masculine”.
Yet I do feel that successfully re-launching the menswear market also means to rediscover lost gems such as the designs featured in the “Tailoring Philadelphia” event.
Indeed Toscani gave through his work an “invaluable contribution to the art of tailoring” and I genuinely think there are still many things his creations can teach us about fashion design, history and menswear.
For further inspirations about menswear designs and Philadelphia, check out George Cukor's classic The Philadelphia Story (1940).
The film mainly features Katharine Hepburn wearing lavish gowns by Adrian (and I will hopefully investigate them in another post...), but with Cary Grant, James Stewart and John Howard as the male protagonists, there are plenty of menswear designs to keep an eye on.
With many thanks to Kamira, who works at the Perelman Building and suggested me while we chatted about the museum and our mutual artistic ambitions, not to miss the exhibition on the second floor.
I have already written about Italian comic Satanik and the quest for a stronger woman and The Avengers and current fashion collections in previous posts.
Yet a personal research I did in the last few months about comics, fashion and films brought a new comparison, this time between Satanik and The Avengers.
A while back I found indeed an issue of Satanik entitled "Rapsodia in nero" ("Rhapsody in Black", almost a reference to early Italian silent film Rapsodia Satanica or "Satanic Rhapsody") in which the protagonist goes to visit London in the 60s.
One of the first things she does as soon as she arrives is obviously going to a shop where she buys a mini-skirt in Mary Quant style.
Satanik then ends up in a castle where mysterious things (read druidic sacrifices...) happen and where she meets the lord of the manor, Sir Anthony, a man decked in classic London attire (bowler hat and umbrella included) even when he’s inside the castle.
The story brought to mind this Avengers photoshoot in which the main characters were photographed with model Twiggy and with different Olympic heroes and athletes.
Mention the word “denim“ and people will instantly conjure up in their minds different images.
Some will think about workwear, miners, cowboys and Genoa sailors; others will dream about hippies or film icons, while fashionistas will sadly settle on the latest trends seen on one of the main global runways.
Since the 17th century when it first became popular, this twill-weave fabric has substantially remained the same, while radically changing at the same time.
Levi Strauss may have written the first “denim success story“ in the mid-1850s, followed half a century later by his competitors, The Hudson Overall Company (later on Wrangler) and H.D. Lee Mercantile Company, but this fabric, first employed for workwear, has definitely gone a long way.
The transformations denim went through were helped by music icons and film stars who often used denim garments to channel the "rebel" look.
In just a few decades' time, denim trousers assumed the role of “great leveller“, turning into a garment worn by everybody, from business magnates to politicians, from actors to style icons.
In more recent years we have seen very fashionable collaborations between famous denim producers and glamorous fashion designers and labels, the list is long and comprises the collaborations between Acne and Lanvin, Levi’s and Jean Paul Gaultier and, more recently, Prada's “Made in Japan” jeans, produced in collaboration with Japanese denim manufacturer Dova and featuring hand-painted details next to the internal label.
As the offer dramatically widened (chronicled also by books, but also by entire websites and blogs dedicated to denim), the "great leveller" turned into the "great divider": nowadays you can have a variety of silhouettes and washes, from skinny to baggier, in deep inky blue, black, bleached, clean, dirty, acid-washed or ripped, or you can maybe opt for denim couture, that is designs that combine denim with luxurious fabrics such as silk or painstakingly elaborate embroideries.
Yet, while the choice widened, the rush to ensure denim remained an endlessly fashionable fabric often caused consumer alienation.
I often found myself skipping at various trade fairs the stand of the umpteenth denim garment retailer trying to prove they had done something innovative and never seen before in their latest collection.
Many brands and labels forgot indeed about avant-garde, originality and fun, to focus on more commercial points (yes, I know the essential point of denim is that it is a relatively cheap and popular fabric, but this doesn't mean it must be boring...).
I was therefore glad to see something interesting on the Tokyo Fashion Week's runway. Mint Designs’ Hokuto Katsui and Nao Yagi came up with a very special denim-based collection.
The focus was indeed on the cut and on the shapes - that went from voluminous to deconstructed - and on varying shades of blue, including ink and indigo.
The designers successfully avoided falling into the trap of coming up with just another pair of denim trousers, focusing on coats, vests, dresses and jackets, matching them with jersey tops, shoes in bright or neutral shades and denim headdresses.
The most interesting denim pieces were the trousers and dresses decorated with zigzagging motifs or with silhouettes of little girls dancing, but also the coat dresses in which the coat seams perfectly fused with the dress seams creating an interesting optical illusion and the jackets covered in automatic buttons that could be used to apply random denim pockets, altering in this way the look or the silhouette of the garment.
Overalls were given a tailored twist or used to explore the possibilities offered by different volumes by applying zips that, crisscrossing the designs, allow the wearers to instantly alter the garment at their will.
As a whole the collection was a refreshing take on denim and it's definitely one of the most covetable interpretations of traditional denim for the next Spring/Summer season.
There were a few denim designs also in Fur Fur’s collection (less interesting denim-wise compared to Mint Designs). Designer Koichi Chida mainly focused on colourful and voluminously ample dresses with prints of Snoopy and The Peanuts, but denim made an appearance here and there in dresses with ruffled sleeves and in trousers matched with a shirt and a denim apron.
I must admit that, though the denim-based designs in these collections may not look as revolutionary as Junya Watanabe's pieces for Comme des Garçons's Autumn/Winter 2002-03 collection (remember the jackets that featured denim pieces cut in odd shapes?), they prove that a genuine denim Renaissance is genuinely possible and, at times, it produces even better results than the usual collaborations between denim-based brands and famous fashion designers.
We all know that fashion works in circles, so it's only natural that what was fashionable 40 or 50 years ago, may somehow resurface in contemporary collections and be considered once again edgy and trendy.
During the last few seasons I've enjoyed spotting references between designs from the past and contemporary collections and creating collages of old and new images on my notebooks.
Yesterday afternoon I resumed my little game of spotting connections when a friend who knows about my personal researches on space age-related fashion designs sent me some images from Jackie JS Lee’s new collection.
The Korean designer spent five years working as a pattern cutter in her home country and then in London where she also completed her MA from Central Saint Martins.
Her experiences as pattern cutter can be detected in the smooth and clean lines of her tailored and at times architectural silhouettes, yet there is also another influence in the designer's Spring/Summer 2011 collection, the 60s.
It was indeed almost impossible not to spot a space-age derivation in those designs that incorporate a sort of rocket-shaped hood.
In the Summer of 1967 the Fontana Sisters created a collection that featured colourful capes - mentioned in a post on cosmic fashion and in another previous post on this blog - conceived as crossovers between a beach hut and a space rocket.
In the post on cosmic fashion, there was also a small image taken from a July 1969 paper showing a woman wearing a creation that included a rocket-shaped hood that called to mind the astronauts’ space suits.
You could argue that Jackie JS Lee's designs focus on practicality, function, style and comfort and they are definitely more minimalist and structured than the Fontana Sisters', though they feature plastic details and inserts that call to mind Pierre Cardin's obsession with technology, lasers, the cosmos, space travel, spacesuits and astronauts' helmets and remind in their trapezoidal shapes those 60s creations designed to evoke rockets or arrows pointing towards the sky.
I'm embedding here four videos to allow you to make more comparisons or fashion discoveries. The first one is from 1965 and shows the "astro cap" (and that sort of ties in also with my previous post about the return of the space helmet); the second video, from 1967, focuses on "Astro Fashion" and is directly connected with the third one, again from 1967, that features the Fontana Sisters rocket-shaped cape. The last video features instead a high collar cape that also references in its shape space rockets, though it's definitely less extreme than other designs from those years.
For a satire of the "rocket style", check out instead the fifth image on this post dedicated to William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966).
NB Please note: the Metacafe videos embedded do not work anymore; please watch the clips at the following Babelgum links: Hats (first video); London Summer 1967 (third video); London 1967 (fourth video).
I don’t like boasting, but I must be honest: if I had been given a penny for all the times I’ve been stopped in the street (even by road workers – thank you, guys!) while walking around Philadelphia and New York for my car necklace, I would be rich by now.
I know for sure I ended in the personal photo albums of a few groups of tourists from as far away as Argentina and Japan and I think I will be responsible for a car necklace trend that may invade first the States and then move onto Europe. Yet, this is not the main point of this post.
Judging from the smile on people’s faces and from the stupor caused by a rather funny and very cheap necklace almost entirely made of plastic and bursting with Pop Art superficiality, most consumers aren’t looking at the moment for extremely expensive and boring stuff, but for pieces that can be fun, surreal and, well, affordable.
It doesn’t matter what they tell you about the luxury market and its growth in countries like Asia, since luxury is essentially dedicated to a very small part of the global population.
Despite what fashion magazines, blogs and other assorted publications rant about, most of us can’t really afford designer clothes and accessories (in fact not even Anna Dello Russo could probably afford what she wears if she weren’t given it for free…but we'll get back on this point in future posts maybe).
So, in between walking and being stopped, I started pondering a bit and wondered which designer/label created in the past very affordable, Pop Art and fun clothes and accessories and only one name came to my mind, Fiorucci.
Founded in May 1967, Fiorucci was sold in the 90s to a Japanese company and produced in the last few years rather banal collections.
In the meantime, the company's founder Elio Fiorucci mainly focused on a young line (“Baby Angel”) for Italian High Street retailer Oviesse (mainly made in China garments, with some pieces made in Italy) and another average line called “Love Therapy”.
The designer was spotted during Milan Fashion Week chatting with Anna Wintour at an event dedicated to young fashion designers and I genuinely hope he was illustrating her his new plans to conquer the world for the second time, rather than reminding her of the Fiorucci heydays.
In the 70s, Fiorucci opened a shop in NY designed by Ettore Sottssass (I mean, Ettore Sottssass – argh!), Andrea Branzi and Franco Marabelli, that soon became very popular with the local scene: Andy Warhol launched his Interview Magazine there in 1977, signing copies of the magazine (and of a book they had done together) with Truman Capote (Truman Capote – double argh!), Ruben Toledo used to do windows displays for it, his wife Isabel sold her clothes there and Maripol launched her jewellery line there in 1978.
In a fashion industry that mainly regurgitates every year the same bland ideas from the past (remember the Marc Jacobs-Maripol’s gummy jewellery launched a few months ago?), I would like to launch an appeal to Elio Fiorucci: dear Elio, could you please reissue the entire Fiorucci product line from the 80s?
If consumers are after something funny, colourful and cheap, I guess this is the right time to put out on the market again the shocking pink plastic beach baskets with cut out motifs of palms, the colourful harness bell necklaces, the neon coloured scarves with little prints of the iconic Fiorucci cherubs, the outrageous 1967 gladiators sandals and the plastic hairpins with planets (mine is 27 years old, so I may need a new one soon...).
Many people out there remember Fiorucci as the first brand that created innovative products such as stretch denim trousers.
For me this brand represented something much more important, a way to put out on the market new ideas, show how Italy was able to launch innovative trends (a skill that my home country has sadly lost, looking too much outside its boundaries to find the next big thing) and influence entire scenes like New York's.
Time to resurrect "Fiorucciland", then? Probably, yes. In the meantime, where did I put my beloved Panini for Fiorucci sticker album?
Fur will be all the rage this Winter, but, if you’re not into it, there is something else to look forward in November, the results of the “Cool vs. Cruel” fashion design competition.
This event is sponsored by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the nation's largest animal protection organisation, and is organised to raise awareness within the fashion community about the cruelty of fur.
The project challenges students from different American art institutes to move from a fur-based design by famous labels and designers - this year the starting points are designs by Zac Posen, Giorgio Armani, Burberry Prorsum, or Thakoon - and reinterpret them with animal-friendly alternatives.
The designs in this window shop in Philadelphia's Chestnut Street were created by the fashion design students from the local Art Institute (the following students from the local art academy participated in this year's competition: Daiman Arrington, Cassandra Bressler, Neury Caba, Diana Coccetti, Corrie Ellis, Chantel Jones, Keeley Knatz, Hien Manh Nguyen, My-Hoa Nguyen, Sary Rin, Marquita Robinson, Kim Springs, Natacha Tran, Alexis Walls - you can check out their creations here).
The Art Institute of Philadelphia is represented at this year's competition by Diana Coccetti. Winners were chosen last week, but they will be announced in November.
The grand prize winner will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City for the awards ceremony and an internship with an acclaimed fur-free designer. Last year’s winner came from the Art Institute of Vancouver and replaced fur in her design with a layered grey polyester felt.
You can keep updated about this project by checking the "Cool vs. Cruel" Facebook page. In the meantime, I’m embedding here a video from 1954 with some rather extravagant fur-based designs in case you want to experiment a bit and start getting ready for the 2011 edition of the "Cool vs. Cruel" comp.
The more commercial The Philadelphia Collection, a 10 day-long celebration of fashion, kicked off instead at the end of September.
Some events connected with it like the exhibition "From Mad Men to Mod Women: Fashion in the 1960s" are actually still going.
You'll find this exhibition (until tomorrow) on the 2nd Floor of the Art Hallway Gallery at the local Free Library (NB the library Art Department also seems to have an interesting stock of books about fashion and design and, around the corner from it, you'll find a little second hand bookshop that also sells old books discarded from the library, so you'll have good chances of finding some interesting volumes there for very little).
Moving from the popular television show, this small but well-organised exhibition explores through Saturday Evening Post covers, images from the Library’s collection and magazine fashion spreads, the changes occurred throughout the 60s in culture, fashion and society.
During The Philadelphia Collection event there was also the launch of the product design marketing agency called The Fashion Lab.
The latter is also the first full service fashion development industry training program for low income students.
Talking about students here are some designs that were exhibited in the windows at The Gallery at Market East.
All the designs were made by the local Art Institute students using recycled materials.
I'm not too sure about where the materials came from, but judging from the prints (in some cases calling to mind a sort of classic vintage music hall aesthetic) and the fabric consistency, some of them must have been flags/advertsing banners.
